“Shall I give you Miss ——? She is about my height, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort; she wants sentiment in every feature; she manages to make her hair look well; her nostrils are very fine, though a little painful; her mouth is bad and good; her profile is better than her full face, which, indeed, is not full, but pale and thin, without showing any bone; her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements; her arms are good, her hands bad-ish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen, but she is ignorant; monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term—Minx: this is, I think, from no innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it. She had a friend to visit her lately; you have known plenty such—she plays the music, but without one sensation but the feel of the ivory at her fingers; she is a downright Miss, without one set-off. We hated her, and smoked her, and baited her, and, I think, drove her away. Miss ——, thinks her a paragon of fashion, and says she is the only woman in the world she would change persons with. What a stupe,—she is as superior as a rose to a dandelion.”[6] There is nothing explicit as to the date of this passage; but there is no longer any doubt that this sketch has reference to Miss Brawne, and that Keats had now found that most dangerous of objects a woman “alternating attraction and repulsion.” The lady’s children assured me that the description answered to the facts in every particular except that of age: the correct expression would be “not nineteen”; but Keats was not infallible on such a point; and the holograph letter in which he wrote “Miss Brawne” in full shews that he made a mistake as to her age. When he wrote this passage, he was, I should judge, feeling a certain resentment analogous to what found a much more tender expression in the first letter of the present series, when the circumstances made increased tenderness a matter of course,—a resentment of the feeling that he was becoming enslaved. There is no announcement of his engagement in the original letter to his brother and sister-in-law, which I have read; and it would seem improbable that he was engaged when he wrote it. But of the journal letter begun on the 14th of February, 1819, and finished on the 3rd of May, only a part of the holograph is accessible; and there may possibly have been such an announcement in the missing part, while, under some date between the 19th of March and the 15th of April, Keats writes the following paragraph and sonnet, from which it might be inferred that the engagement had been announced in an unpublished letter.